The timing of this thread is great. Watching Spider-Man 3 last week, and thinking about how much higher a budget these big comic book movies have than the prequels, it made me wonder if the modern day equivalent of an Empire Strikes Back sized budget for each of the prequels would've significantly improved them. This does raise the question of what that would be exactly and if the prequels didn't already have them anyway. Going over the numbers in my head, TPM was 130 million or so and AOTC and ROTS were 110 million each. I know they said film processing accounted for several million dollars on TPM, but it couldn't have made the entire difference. For whatever reason, Lucas scaled it back for the prequel sequels. The other thing is how everyone was saying from before TPM even came out that Lucas was saving boatloads of money on effects because he owns ILM.

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I forgot where I was going with all of this so I'll just leave it at that.